Low Cost of Living and High Standard of Living: My Dad's Onyx Art-Deco clock

When I thought back over my interest in co-operative living I realised several things. Firstly, I have been thinking about and studying different forms of living since the late 1960s: well over 50 years.

And that interest has followed me around a number of communities spread over many different situations (like old manor houses, groups of tents deep in the woods, converted cow sheds, straw-bale constructions in the mountains, new-age constructions with Trombe walls in the Catskills—you name it, I’ve probably long-since sent the T-shirt to Oxfam).

And along the way I have had a number of epiphanies that have led me to investigate all sorts of aspects, from the politics and sociology, to the geography, town-planning, ecology, building science, physics of heat transfer, economics—again, name a subject area and, somewhere in a box in the attic, I probably have a notebook full of jottings, or designs stashed on a hard-drive, or lists of experts whose brains I have mined.

The results of all this is that I have developed two key design goals that really drive me. One is to enable people with very specialised interests and skill sets to make a living, where they probably can’t now, and the other is to save the planet. So, no pressure there then.

Let me give you an example of how this often plays out. Susan has compiled a list of subject areas that we might put on a questionnaire to find out what things are important to people. Well, this is yet another area where I’m a bit of a know-it-all—it’s what I researched for my M.Phil. in Knowledge Engineering. So I rather foolishly said that that wouldn’t be how I would do it. “So, smarty-pants”, she might have said, “why not?”

Well, on this putative questionnaire there might be a question with a sliding scale about how much you’re willing or able to pay for your NFCH dwelling, from 1=Cheap as chips, through to 7=I’m rolling in cash and want total luxury.

If the questionnaire gets really sophisticated there might be an attached question—How important is this to you, 1=I really don’t give two hoots, 7=It’s of vital importance.

So, presented with this questionnaire, I might put “cheap as chips” and “vital”. And you might think I’d put that because either I’m broke, or because I’m a tight-wad, or both. But it isn’t. It’s because of my dad’s onyx art-deco style mantelpiece clock that’s stopped working.

And I’d be a bit irritated (as I often am by questionnaires) by the fact that it hadn’t actually asked me the question that’s really important to me (how important is it that living in the community lowers everyone’s overall cost of living?) and hadn’t uncovered why that question is important and what it has to do with my dad’s onyx art-deco clock.

It’s because one of the effects of the way our economy and lives are structured today is that, in order to survive, there’s a minimum hourly rate we all need to earn, just to survive. Add together housing costs, utility costs, transport costs, food costs, clothing costs, etc etc, and divide by the number of hours you’re prepared to work and you arrive at the minimum hourly rate you need to survive.

And then, if you’re a clock repair person with a small shop in a local town, you have to add rent, utilities for the shop, etc., and you have to be charging £50/hour for your services.

So when presented with my dad’s non-functioning clock, and you know from your professional experience that it’s probably going to take you six hours to fix it (factoring in your commuting time to get from home to work each day) you know you’re going to have to charge £300, and you know the clock’s only worth £100, so your answer is “chuck it in the bin”.

But if you lived in NFCH and that whole project was designed to lower your total cost of living: not just housing costs, but utilities costs (microgrid and solar), food costs (horticulture and agriculture), transport costs (your workshop is just a few steps from your home), and, on top of that, there are other people who want to learn from you and become apprentices, and would be happy to work on that clock, under your tutelage, for peanuts, then the clock doesn’t get thrown in the bin, it gets repaired and recycled, and a great deal of satisfaction is felt by all concerned.

And this is true of so many small businesses possibilities: good ideas for which we can’t make a business case because the person concerned needs to make a living, and that living makes their products or services too expensive.

Going back to that questionnaire—I wouldn’t start with a questionnaire, I’d start with a series of very open interviews, with as little structure as possible, to unearth as many strange ideas like this as possible, before sieving all those interviews and using the results to come up with the questionnaire. Questions often produce “closed results” whereas chatty interviews tend to produce open results. And if you do two rounds, where people get to read each other’s interviews, very often it opens up even more, as people go “Oh! I never thought of that”, and produce even more interesting stuff. And we start thinking about such things as “how can we structure the community to make Basia’s doula business work better?”, or “could we all benefit if the community could, in some way, facilitate Lisa’s craft-work hobby?”

It would produce a different sort of community.